For MMA fighters, caring about public opinion is part of the job

Nearly 2,000 years ago, back when the Romans were still walking around in bathrobes and sandals, conquering and plundering and doing their best to spread the gospel of bathrobes and sandals to the rest of the known world, the emperor Marcus Aurelius paused in his relentless empire-ing long enough to observe: “I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”

They may not have had Twitter or Internet forums back then (instead they settled for actual physical forums), but if the good emperor were alive today, I have to think he’d find humanity much the same as he left it. We’re still very concerned with what others think, still pretending that we aren’t, and still powerless to do much about it.

This seems especially true for pro fighters, who – almost as a condition of their employment – have to concern themselves with what people think of them, even if what those people think is often far out of their control.

Fighters are just like the rest of us in that they can decide what to say, how to act, and which version of themselves to present to the world, but they don’t get to decide how that person is perceived. None of us do. It’s just that, when you do your job inside a cage and on TV, there’s a lot more perceiving going on. It’s easy to take Aurelius’s advice when “the opinion of others” represents a limited group consisting only of a dozen coworkers and the jerks on your flag-football team. When it’s an audience of millions, and when there are serious financial consequences, it gets a lot tougher.

This is the case not just for the fighters who make themselves into profitable villains, but also for guys like Brian Stann, who look around one day and find themselves stuck in a certain mold that they can’t get out of. For Stann, it’s the military stuff that keeps coming up in every interview. People want to hear about his time in the Marines. They want to hear the war stories. They’ve already heard them, of course, which is why they’re asking in the first place, but now they want their own version that they can trade for page views or ratings.

For a long time, Stann went along with it. As a WEC fighter who didn’t think he’d even get to hang around as a pro fighter for very long, he didn’t feel like he had much choice, as he told me in a phone interview this week.

“Because I first came to the attention of the media in a growing organization on a new channel that they were trying to drive viewers to, they were going to exploit my story, and they were going to throw it in people’s faces quite often, even though I had a limited skill set,” Stann told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “I think that pigeonholed me for quite some time.”

Stann found himself limited in terms of not only what people wanted to talk to him about – and just see how many times you can be asked to relive painful, horrifying memories before you get a little sick of it – but also in how they saw him. It became a struggle to be seen as anything other than “a robotic Marine,” he said.

Any story about him on any website seemed guarantee to spark a virulent debate over American foreign policy in the comments section. Even when he banned himself from even glancing at reader comments, he still had friends and family who somehow thought it was a good idea to alert him when he was being blamed for everything from the invasion of Iraq to civilian deaths in Afghanistan. It wasn’t that he wanted to have his whole life and fighting career viewed through the prism of his military experience, but “all we can do is answer the questions that the media asks us,” he said. “In my situation, it just seems like a lot of the same stuff kept coming up.”

And that’s the problem for any fighter once the public-opinion snowball starts rolling downhill. The perception fuels the interview questions and the stories, and the interviews and stories then add to the perception. With Stann’s impending middleweight bout against Michael Bisping at UFC 152, he knows he has weeks of questions about his military service still ahead of him, just like Bisping knows he’ll hear the same questions about what it feels like to get booed by American audiences every time he shows up at a UFC event. (“He’s earned that,” Stann said of Bisping’s reputation as an MMA villain. “He knows what he’s doing”)

But even those who are knowingly playing to the perceptions didn’t all start out that way. I remember, before his title fight with Georges St-Pierre at UFC 124, Josh Koscheck told me that he was shocked the first time he went to a UFC event after his stint on the first season of “The Ultimate Fighter.” As soon as they showed his face on the arena’s big screen, the place erupted in boos.

“Dana came over and said, ‘Congratulations, they’re booing you,'” Koscheck said. “I said, ‘That’s something to be congratulated for?’ And he goes, ‘If they were silent as a church mouse, then we’d have a problem.’ I thought, good point, Dana. So I went with it, and here I am five or six years later, and I’m still in the UFC and about to fight for a title, so I must be doing something right.”

In that sense, being pigeonholed, or at least learning to live with it, is in the fighter’s job description. They offer themselves up in the court of public opinion, and they have to take whatever comes their way. Sometimes, as in Stann’s case, it’s not exactly what they hoped for.

“It does happen. It’s part of the job, and we can’t change that,” Stann said. There have been plenty of times when he’s seen it happen to other fighters too, sometimes even teammates, and sometimes when he knows that the public perception of them is entirely inaccurate, “but I won’t say that’s unfair,” he added.

“I might say it’s unwarranted or unjustified, but that’s the price we pay,” Stann said. “We’re very fortunate. … If you don’t want to be scrutinized under a microscope, don’t be a professional athlete. Don’t be an actor. Don’t be anything in the entertainment industry. But we are, so I wouldn’t say it’s unfair because that comes with the territory.”

Then again, it’s still relatively easy for Stann to say. Being asked over and over again what it’s like to be a war hero probably isn’t the worst fate a pro fighter could suffer. When fans simply decide they hate you, even if they can’t articulate a reason why, it’s a different story. Sometimes fight fans will base a decision on a guy on one performance, one throwaway line in an interview, one criticism from one former training partner. Sometimes they just don’t like the look on a guy’s face.

That’s not so different from what anybody goes through. None of us can control what other people think of us, even if we keep trying, in ways both big and small. It’s hard enough for your average person to reconcile if one stranger decides to hate him. Multiply that by millions, and it has the potential to drive you crazy, if you let it.

But then, as Stann pointed out, “Opinions change so quickly. People will be down on this guy one minute, then something happens, and they view him differently. Look at Chael Sonnen.”

Better look fast, before the winds shift again. Those in the public eye may not get to choose which way the breezes blow, but they do get to decide whether they lean with them or against them. The latter seems more likely to prove futile in the end while the former might take you somewhere you never wanted to go.

Maybe the best thing you can do is follow the emperor’s example and learn to listen to the one voice within while ignoring all the ones without. It’s easier said than done, though. Because really, the problem with other people isn’t just that you have no control over what they think of you. It’s also that, no matter how wrong you tell yourself they are, there are always so many more of them than there are of you.